Mavericks: Proving Grounds talking 400-player battle royale at Rezzed

What do you get if you cross a video games show with a 400-player battle royale game? A newly-announced session at EGX Rezzed in April where a developer will gab about the upcoming Mavericks: Proving Grounds. The Plunk ’em up will use Improbable’s much-vaunted SpatialOS cloud server technology for fancy features like trackable persistent footprints and destructible buildings, so even if you’re not interested in battling royale you might enjoy nodding along and murmuring “Ah yes, building games in the sky, truly we live in the future.”Mavericks is meant to eventually become a big MMO doodad with up to one thousand players, but developers Automaton plan to start slightly smaller with a 400-player battle royale mode due this year.

Automaton boast of “unprecedented world simulation and effects, including environmental destruction, roaming wildlife, dynamic weather, foliage displacement, tracks, blood trails, fire and water effects,” and I’d imagine CEO James Thompson will talk plenty about all that.

All I’ve seen of Mavericks so far is a few environment shots and a lot of feature bullet points, which don’t say much about what it’s actually like, so I am intrigued by the mention that Thompson will “show off” the game.

EGX Rezzed, to remind you, is the London games show run by our corporate siblings, running April 13-15th. Tickets are over here. This particular session will be at 4pm on Friday the 13th, and will be streamed online for free too.

Most of the RPS gang are attending Rezzed this year, hosting a number of sessions and lurking in pubs. I myself am not going so I would be grateful if one of youse could go to this and during the Q&A ask petulant questions like “But how do you reach the clouds to put the games in? Do you have a long ladder? Isn’t there a serious risk of computers raining from the sky and crushing people?” until the moderator wrenches the microphone from your hands, and even more grateful if you covered for me with The Man by saying it was totally your idea and you’ve never even heard of RPS. Ta!